Land and currency sales will cease immediately, but the grid’s free land offer will continue until the end of April, Reite told Hypergrid Business. “We are still letting people play with that until the day we close the grid.”

Region owners will be offered an OAR export of their builds that they can take to other grids. Many grids, including Kitely and DigiWorldz, as well as independent hosting providers like Dreamland Metaverse and Oliveira, offer OAR imports, meaning that users can move their entire regions over. Those running home-based regions or grids can use the OpenSim console Load OAR command to import a full region file.

The only user who had an outstanding balance in the grid’s IR$ virtual currency has already received a refund, Reite said.

Inventory exports in the form of IAR files may also be available, he added, though he’s had problems with the exports in the past.

“Users can request an IAR export, but it is not guaranteed to be usable,” he said.

New regulations

“It is our opinion that OpenSimulator as currently offered, especially the currency module, is not secure enough to meet the requirements of
the new regulations,” he said. “We do not have time to develop new code to meet those requirements.”

Immersive Reality uses the IR$ local currency.

Switching to a fully external currency, like Gloebit, would address some but not all of the issues, he said. To start with, the Gloebit currency is fully convertible, but, as a gambling grid, IR$ have to be non-convertible.

“And while switching to Gloebit might resolve some security issues, there is still the problem with collecting personally identifiable information,
in this case an email address,” he added.

GDPR requires that European users have to offer informed consent before their personal data is collected, to encrypt personal data that is stored, and to offer users the option to delete all their data if they want.

“Although some have suggested configuring a firewall to block known European IP addresses, that would be a lot of work and we feel that it’s
just better to close down the whole grid before the regulations go into effect,” he said.

Once the grid closes down, he said, the database will be erased and all personal information permanently deleted.

Lack of users

Reite also cited a lack of interest in the grid as one of the motivating factors for the closing.

The grid peaked at 24 active monthly users in May of 2016, and has reported a dozen or fewer actives each month for the past year.

Maria Korolov is editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business. She has been a journalist for more than twenty years and has worked for the Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and Computerworld and has reported from over a dozen countries, including Russia and China. Follow me on Twitter @MariaKorolov.

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